


new and a bit alarming

by mletart



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bookstore, I mean the title probably clues you in but just to be clear this is s u p e r self indulgent, M/M, there is no plot but there is a lot of gift giving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 22:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20767619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mletart/pseuds/mletart
Summary: For Pynch Week 20199/24 - Coffee Shop/Bookstore AUIn which Adam works at a bookstore and Ronan shows affection the best way he knows how?





	new and a bit alarming

"What's the matter, runt, can't reach?"

Ronan felt a smirk curve the corner of his mouth as Adam whirled around to face him, spine gone stiff and expression terse and prissy. 

Ronan snagged the book off the shelf that Adam had been stretching for, focusing on waving it obnoxiously above Adam's head instead of letting himself focus on how close the two of them were now that Adam had turned around. Looming right behind him to give Adam a hard time was one thing. Standing two inches apart, nose to nose, with eye contact, was something else altogether.

Maintaining his smirk and stamping down the impulse to swallow, Ronan lowered the book just a little so that Adam could grab it without having to jump for it, and Adam snatched it from Ronan's hand and took a few steps away as he opened the book to thumb through it.

"I think there may be a lead about the shield we found in here," Adam said, frowning pensively.

Ronan slumped back against the bookshelf and made a show of pretending to snore. "Is Gansey here? Who cares, Parrish? I want pecan pie and that tea that tastes like licorice and the air after a fireworks show."

"Are you talking about the one you ordered the last time? Because no one else would describe it that way."

"That's exactly what it tastes like, Parrish, don't give me your backtalk, I'm a paying customer," Ronan flicked his fingers in Adam’s face, enjoying the way it made Adam’s brow furrow unappreciatively. “Which means you can’t look at me like that.”

Adam cocked an eyebrow. “I was remembering the first time you came in here. You were very obvious about not wanting to be here, and I have a distinct memory of Gansey telling you that _this shouldn’t take long_. I was just thinking what a shame it was, how off the mark he ended up being.”

“Wow. You wanna know what’s really a shame? Someone wasted their time inventing sunblock when we’re surrounded by Adam Parrish’s shade.”

Adam looked back at Ronan with a quietly inscrutable expression, like he thought that if he didn’t let it show then Ronan would never be able to tell that he was oddly proud of the sentiment despite himself.

Adam looked away from him, and Ronan bit at the leather bands on his wrist. 

"Tea," Ronan told Adam. "And pie."

Adam gave him a long familiar and well-worn exasperated look, and went to the bookstore's café to start the tea.

Ronan hung back.

He remembered the first time Gansey dragged him here, one of the many endless stops on Gansey's quest to find his king. To say Ronan had been uninterested in going in with Gansey would have been an incredibly generous understatement.

The bookstore was called The Fox Way and it was an amalgam of ridiculous shit. It wasn't satisfied with just selling books. It was partly a café, which wouldn't have been unusual if not for the absurd flavors they advertised with absurd health benefits. It offered psychic readings and sold psychic gimmicks. It hosted music nights and paint nights and yoga classes and self-defense classes and anything else they could think up, apparently. Ronan swore he was going to get a rash just breathing the air in there.

Gansey, despite his wide-eyed optimism, wasn’t stupid, and Ronan had hoped that he would look around and see at a glance that the place was full of shit and then they could leave. The wrench in that plan was that Adam Parrish had been working in the bookstore, who they’d known from school but hadn’t seemed to find a way to really get to know, though Gansey had wanted to. (Ronan did too, but not for the same reasons. Probably.)

Gansey, in a very Gansey-like fashion, had recruited Adam to aid him in his quest. That first day, Gansey had talked about Glendower for almost forty-five minutes before he apologized for taking up so much of Adam’s time. Adam had politely waved it off and offered to get some books together that might interest Gansey if Gansey wanted to come back the next day, and so Gansey had. After that, they didn’t visit The Fox Way every day, but they visited more days than not. Gansey, in a very Gansey-like fashion, seemed to have all of the employees at The Fox Way at least a little bit interested in his quest, and The Fox Way seemed to have a truly absurd amount of employees who seemed to work all different absurd hours.

At first Ronan had been wary of visiting the bookstore by himself. He liked having Gansey or at least Noah as a sort of buffer. An excuse. But Gansey invited Adam and Blue along on expeditions outside of the bookstore, and soon enough it felt like they were all actual friends instead of just sort of unwitting research partners who happened to have been sucked into Richard Campbell Gansey III’s orbit. Ronan decided without ever really thinking about it too much that even if he couldn’t stand the general atmosphere of The Fox Way there was no reason he couldn’t go and rag on Adam if he wanted.

Ronan fell into the habit of visiting Adam at the bookstore because Adam took the late shifts (the weirdass women who ran The Fox Way were big believers in the store being accessible at all sorts of hours) and so it was something to do when Ronan couldn’t sleep anyway. Hardly any customers came in, and the fact that he was working made Adam feel like he was being productive, even if he didn’t have anything that he had to attend to as an employee, so Adam was slightly more likely to be willing to give Ronan his attention. Slightly; Adam still had schoolwork and studying to keep him occupied in his downtime, but still, Ronan’s odds were better than other times.

Wanting Adam’s attention was a problem. The more Ronan got, the more he wanted. It was nothing but trouble. And trouble when you were Ronan Lynch didn’t come in the simple form of clumsy conversations or spending too much time wistfully wondering what the person you liked may be doing. It came in the form of dreams he didn’t want to be having, that he couldn’t always keep inside his own head. Sometimes those dreams manifested and the _last_ thing Ronan needed was physical evidence.

The dream Ronan had the night before had been uncharacteristically serene and, when he'd woken up, vaguely mortifying to think about. In the dream, he'd given Adam a book as a gift, and when Adam opened the book, it'd kept giving him gifts, flowers and seashells and jars with tiny stars caught inside in different constellations.

He'd woken with the book in his hands and the memory of Adam's eyes on him, cautious but pleased, and the full knowledge that this was exactly the kind of trouble he hadn't wanted. Sometimes good dreams were almost worse than his nightmares, because they were false as hell and harder to throw off in the light of day.

Ronan didn't believe there was any real world chance that things would work out for him with a dreamt up gift-giving book creation that was possibly the least subtle thing his subconscious had ever devised. Who the hell knew what was going to come out of it?

But he knew from the dream that the book had come from that it wasn't monsters or the usual thousand sharp edges lurking in his head that he had to worry about. Which was a relief, in its way, but the thought of how Adam would react to the book in the waking world was still a cringingly terrible one. All the same, the book was for Adam. Sleeping or waking it was meant for him and holding onto it felt like lying, or thieving.

So Ronan had brought the book to the store with him, in the messenger bag Adam had seen often enough when Ronan was sneaking Chainsaw around that Adam hadn’t looked twice at it. Ronan pulled the book out now and stretched to slide it onto the shelf above the one Adam had needed to reach for. Ronan scowled at the dream book, innocuous enough among all the other volumes. This wasn't a good plan - Ronan knew this was actively a _bad_ plan - but of all the available options Ronan could think of this one suited him best. Let Adam find it or not.

It took a conscious effort not to look back at the spot on the shelf as Ronan went over to the dingy café corner of the bookstore where Adam was finishing putting together his drink. 

Ronan paid with a 50 and dumped the change Adam counted out into the tip jar, staring Adam down while he did it, a silent _how you gonna stop me, Parrish?_

Adam wouldn't, if only because the tips weren't just for him, they were divided between all the employees. He glared back at Ronan, a dark heavy disapproving thing, because he wasn't a very graceful loser.

Ronan, who viewed that glare as a success as opposed to a warning, hopped up onto the counter and sipped his tea.

"Lynch," Adam said with more of that long familiar exasperation. "There are six different chairs."

"Yeah? What's your point?" Ronan asked, unconcerned. "This is kinda nasty," he added conversationally, holding up his cup a little.

"You ordered it."

"I know. It was kinda nasty last time too." 

Adam arched his eyebrows, a minimalistic expression that was probably the equivalent of tossing your hands up if it were anyone else.

"The licorice is a little gross but the fireworks makes you keep thinking it might not be so bad," Ronan pronounced, swirling the tea. "Try it."

"I don't need to try it."

"Is it cuz you poisoned it?"

"Yup."

Ronan took a big slurp, defiantly, and then put it down next to Adam. Adam didn't deign to push it back to Ronan, he didn't touch it at all. A stalemate.

Ronan started on the pecan pie. "This is good. Not even a little bit gross."

"I probably shouldn't have much more," he said after a few more forkfuls.

Adam gave him a look. "You don't want to eat it because it doesn't taste at least a little bit bad to you?"

"That too," Ronan said, nodding along. "But I meant because I'm allergic to pecans."

Adam stared at him, then down at the half-eaten piece of pie on Ronan's plate. "You're serious?"

"Yeah."

"Lynch!" Adam snapped, dragging Ronan's plate toward himself and the cup of tea.

"That's mine! Give it back or I'm gonna write a letter of complaint to your boss."

"You're not gonna do anything once your throat closes up and you suffocate to death."

Ronan let out a derisive sound between his teeth. "I'm fine. I like the itch, it makes you appreciate the flavors better."

"Uh huh," Adam said, staring back at him flatly. "And you sat there asking if I put poison in your drink. Like I'd need to make that kind of effort. Like you're not a dumbass who's actively shoveling food into his mouth that's going to kill him all on his own."

While Adam was lecturing him, Ronan sneaked a hand out to take back the pie.

Adam slapped it away. Before Ronan could make another move Adam scooped up the plate and took a step back with it, starting to eat.

"Hey!" Ronan said, mock outraged. "What horrible fucking customer service."

"Leave then," Adam said around a deliberate mouthful of pie.

Ronan scoffed at him. "What's the difference? You get rid of me tonight I'm just gonna be back tomorrow."

Adam rolled his eyes, masterfully disdainful, and drank some of the tea. Probably figured there was no reason not to now that things had devolved to this point anyway.

This was the part Gansey always struggled with, Ronan thought. Gansey was full of good intentions but that was why he always hit a wall trying to help Adam. Because after all Adam had experienced, Adam mistrusted anything that made him feel like he owed someone else for what he had. Ronan's secret was that although he wanted Adam to have tea and pie and some of the money Ronan didn't need anyway, which could possibly be recognized as kindness if you had the desire to believe that it was and a bit of an overactive imagination, the simple truth was that Ronan was an asshole. And it wasn't pretense. Ronan was truly an irrefutable asshole. He did think the tea was mostly gross and he did still want to drink it, even if he could only stand it in small doses, the same way he and Matthew always ate candy corn around Halloween. He was allergic to pecans and it didn't stop him from eating pecan pie whether he was sneakily sharing it with Adam or not because pecan pie was delicious and _pecans_ weren't going to be what killed him fuck off. The point was, Ronan was an asshole and even the times he occasionally showed himself to be something maybe possibly a little more than an asshole, his general assholeary had him covered. From Adam's point of view he didn't need to expend the energy wondering about what Ronan's motivations were or what they may mean, and so Ronan got away with things other people couldn't.

Ronan didn't care. It was just good to know it worked. He watched Adam finish the rest of the tea and pie and didn't didn't didn't look over at the spot on the shelf where his dream thing sat waiting.

*

Ronan had known it was a stupid plan even as he'd put the book on the shelf, but he hadn't really considered how agonizing it would be just waiting to see if anything would happen.

Three nights after he'd left the book on the shelf, he'd checked his phone to see seven missed calls from Adam and a text that read _what the hell Lynch get down here_.

Ronan wasn't sure what this meant, exactly, but if it were anything really bad he assumed Adam would have given more information.

Either way it wasn't like Ronan needed an excuse to hang around The Fox Way, so he headed over.

When he got there Adam had already switched the sign on the door around to closed, even though it was a little early for that, so Ronan went up to Adam's apartment. The women who owned The Fox Way gave Adam magic lessons and let Adam rent the apartment above the store. 

He was greeted by an irritated looking Adam and a freakish looking little gremlin of a thing tied up with green vines. It stood somewhere around Ronan's shin and had a vaguely human-like miniature body and a vaguely bird-like head. It was covered in shadowy gray down that was sort of like fur and sort of like feathers, with tiny starburst patterns of white here and there and a narrow band of black surrounding its bright bird-like eyes. Its face was largely comprised of its dark wickedly hooked beak. It didn't have wings and talons but its human-like hands and feet were long and narrow and stretched to thin needle-like points, and were currently trying to tear out of the vines they were trapped in, though the vines seemed to be made of tough stuff. It was letting out a high, trilling frustrated sort of bird call.

Ronan stared down at it. "What the hell?"

"That's my line," Adam countered. "It just showed up in the store and started wreaking havoc. I had to tie it down to stop it climbing shelves and knocking all the books off. It's obviously your handiwork. So what the hell?"

"I didn't dream this thing up itself," Ronan muttered. "I think it's - an unforeseen consequence, from one of my other dreams."

"Well what do we do with it?" 

"I dunno, Parrish, how many options are there? You wanna see if it tastes like chicken?" Ronan intoned sardonically.

The corner of Adam's mouth twisted, a shorthand for _nice, Lynch_.

"I'll take it back with me, you don't have to worry about it," Ronan said, picking the little creature up. The thing thrashed and struggled against the vines more strongly than it did before, less a sign that it wanted to be free to move now and more a sign that it didn't want to have to leave.

"Enough," Ronan told the creature sharply, and it went still and ducked its head a little the way Chainsaw did when she knew she was in trouble.

Adam frowned faintly at the two of them. He made a small motion like a shrug and held out a small glass sphere. Inside of it was a small tree, and as Ronan watched, the bare frost-covered branches slowly started to bud with new spring green leaves. If they kept watching, he was sure the tree would go through the rest of the seasons too.

"It had this when I found it," Adam said, offering it out. "It probably wants this back."

“I doubt it,” Ronan said, and left with the creature before he had to say anything else.

*

Ronan ended up shoving the creature in Noah’s room (because Chainsaw was too jealous to be a good sport about letting another dream creature stay in Ronan’s room with her) and telling himself he’d deal with it tomorrow. He didn’t want to have to think about the ramifications of new dream things spawning from his dumbass dream book that he’d gone and left hanging around the bookstore Adam worked in like a fucking dipshit, not this late at night. Ronan hadn’t told Adam about the book, so what, this dream creature was here to sell him out? Were more sentient living creatures going to come out of the book? He guessed he should go to the bookstore tomorrow and get the book off the shelf and maybe burn it. Would that be the end of it? Dream things were awfully resilient.

He put on his headphones and turned the music up louder than his thoughts. When he slept, he took nothing with him from his dreams, which was a mercy.

Dealing with it tomorrow turned out to be yet another bad idea on top of his overall god awful idea of leaving the book with Adam, because when he went in Noah’s room in the morning, the creature wasn’t there.

Ronan was cursing up a storm and searching the rest of the apartment when his phone chimed with a text from Adam.

_Your dream creature turned back up. I don’t think there’s much point in you taking it back, I think it’ll just come back here again._

When Ronan went down to the bookstore, Adam showed him the creature which was curled up in the corner of the storage room, sleeping in a cardboard box that Adam had lined with an old T-shirt. In the box along with the creature was a miniature self-playing harp that was quietly playing Tchaikovsky, which Ronan’s mother had loved to play around the house.

“Jesus,” Ronan swore.

“It wasn’t so bad today. I think yesterday it was a little out of sorts. And it found the harp God knows where, which helps, the music really seems to calm it down,” Adam said, frowning a little but in a thoughtful way.

Ronan frowned back at him. “What, you want it to stay here?”

“Aren’t you the one who said we don’t have a whole lot of options?”

“That doesn’t mean this is the option we have to go with. Do you want it to stay here?”

Adam still had a contemplative sort of furrow to his brow. “We can see how it goes.”

Christ, this was _such a bad idea_.

*

It was such a bad idea, and Ronan didn’t know what to do about it. There hadn’t been a good opportunity to take back the dream book without Adam noticing when Adam had first agreed that the dream creature could stay, and even though Ronan knew it was nine different levels of stupid, Ronan didn’t go looking for another opportunity. Stupid stupid stupid as it was something about the fact that Adam was willing to keep the dream creature made some truly moronic part of Ronan want to see what would happen. _Such_ a bad idea. 

One of the worst parts was that Ronan didn’t even know how bad it was, because he wasn’t there to see all the excruciating shit that the dream creature passed on to Adam, and he wasn’t about to ask.

Ronan saw some of them around. The glass sphere with the tree sat on Adam’s desk now, arranged on a circle of vines Adam must have made for it. Some of the things Ronan stumbled across were small, like the tattered piece of parchment Adam used as a bookmark that had one of Ronan’s favorite quotes from The Iliad written on it in Ronan’s own handwriting. Some were more obvious. Like the forest green blanket folded at the end of Adam’s bed, that when Ronan ran a hand over it, made him feel distinctly more relaxed and languorous, and he was sure it would make falling asleep so so much easier. Or the lightbulb Adam put in his bedside lamp, which didn’t need to be plugged in anymore and split the light that it gave off like a prism. Ronan was sure there were more that he hadn’t seen or maybe even hadn’t recognized for what they were. There was no way of telling.

It'd all gotten ridiculously out of hand. Adam named the creature, since it was staying with him. He decided to call it Shrike, because he said it looked a little like the bird and sounded a little like the bird too. Shrike made itself a sort of nest in the cabinet under the kitchen sink in Adam's apartment and spent a lot of its time sleeping. When it was awake Adam said Shrike was manageable so long as it was kept busy. To this end, Adam had discovered through some trial and error that Shrike seemed to take great pleasure in using the duster to dust the books in the store, was always eager to play fetch with a rubber ball, and was endlessly fascinated by paper clips. These pastimes Shrike of course fit in around sneaking gifts from the dream book to deliver to Adam, because Shrike seemed to have been created for the purposes of very slowly but determinedly exposing Ronan's secrets. Tiny ass fucking traitor that it was.

Maybe because of Shrike, maybe regardless of Shrike, Ronan thought things were a little bit different between him and Adam lately. Maybe Ronan was just seeing what he wanted to see. But there were small things that almost made him think...something might be starting.

Small things like Adam actually adding to the playlist that Ronan made him. The bookstore had an old beaten up iPod and what music played in the store depended on which employee got to put on their playlist that day. They were very intense about the protocols surrounding the playlists, which from what Ronan understood originated from Blue and Orla having very different equally shitty tastes in music. Adam hadn't made a playlist. Ronan, when he'd realized this, had gone about rectifying the situation immediately. He'd put together roughly seven and a half hours’ worth of music under the title _Parrish's Work Time Shitlist_. Adam never played it, at least never when Ronan was around to hear it, but Ronan put it on the first chance he got.

When Ronan had been there in the bookstore and noticed that the playlist that was going had reached the end, he rushed to the iPod before anyone else could start another. Adam just looked at him with an expression that was too perfectly neutral to be genuine. When the music started, Blue stopped where she was setting up a new window display at the front of the store to spin around and demand, "oh what the hell?"

"It's Parrish's turn," Ronan told her righteously.

Blue stormed over to him. "That isn't _Parrish's_ playlist, it's obviously your music, and you don't work here."

"It's got his name on it," Ronan grinned the grin of someone who could not technically be told they were wrong. "See for yourself."

Blue frowned down at the iPod, and then over at Adam. 

Adam only gave the slightest shrug of his shoulder, as if to say that arguing wouldn't be worth the time or the energy.

"Rules are rules, maggot!" Ronan crowed.

Blue pulled a sour face and focused her attention on the iPod. "We're allowed skips," she muttered. "For Christ's sake, how did you get the Murder Squash song on here and _why did you put it on so many times_ I can't stand you."

Eventually Blue settled on a song Ronan knew for sure he hadn't put on the playlist, and when he went to the iPod to investigate, he saw a handful of other songs on the playlist that weren't his doing.

When he looked up at Adam, Adam's lips were curved very faintly in a grin and his eyes were bright and knowing. Ronan grinned back.

Small things like when the bookstore was closed during one of Adam's usual days to work, because it turned out to be some sort of witchy hippie new agey holiday type thing and Blue's family wanted to hold a séance or whatever the hell, so Adam had come over to Monmouth. Gansey had been up in Washington DC and Noah had been MIA so it'd just been Ronan and Adam. In the field behind the factory that they tended to use to do donuts, they set up a sort of obstacle course involving a massive trampoline, several tarps of various sizes and colors, three inflatable kiddie pools, a hose, some duct tape and some sticks. Adam kept saying they were going to end up in the hospital, but it tended to be through laughter as he stole Ronan's bounce on the trampoline or helped them rock higher in the tarp that they had strung up as a sort of makeshift hammock. They'd ended up with only minor scrapes and some road burn, and it'd been totally worth it.

Small things like the night Ronan showed up during one of Adam's late shifts with a box of pizza and extra-large coffees from Nino's, because he knew Adam had been particularly exhausted, and also knew there was no way Adam would close up early, even though there was no one else in the store and it was safe to assume no one else would come in. No one else did come in, as they worked their way through most of the pizza and then as Adam, a little punch drunk with tiredness, gathered together a bunch of books on palmistry. He was too tired to trust himself to be coherent enough to work on his school assignments, so he'd made up his mind to try to practice a field of psychic study he didn't have much experience with. Ronan thought palmistry was bullshit but he and Adam took turns tracing the lines of each other's palms and consulting the books. Well. Adam consulted the books. Ronan just made shit up. Ronan couldn't remember what bullshit he'd come up with, he'd found the whole thing utterly distracting for reasons he had absolutely no intentions of evaluating too closely, but it'd made Adam laugh. It made Adam laugh so hard Adam had gone into the storage room to try to pull himself together where Ronan couldn't see.

"What are you running away for, Parrish?" Ronan called after him. "I dunno why you're bothering, I can still hear you."

This just made Adam laugh harder.

While Adam was back there composing himself, Ronan started closing the store. Adam came out after a few minutes and helped, and at that point it was late enough that Ronan followed Adam up to his apartment.

After Ronan had settled himself on the floor as usual and Adam had turned off the bedside lamp, Adam said quietly in the darkness, "you don't have to stay on the floor."

Ronan was absolutely not about to take a single step toward the minefield that that could open up, so he said firmly, "Go to sleep, Parrish."

Adam was silent for another minute or two, and then he draped some of the dream blanket over Ronan. "It's good," he said, tired enough that his accent slipped out a little, making the vowels longer. "It works."

"Not that well if you're still awake," Ronan muttered, but already he felt quiet and peaceful.

They both fell asleep quickly after that, and in the morning they ate the leftover pizza for breakfast. Adam's eyes were still drowsy and his hair was a _mess_, and Ronan had never felt such contentment combined with such an overwhelming need to launch himself out of the closest window.

Ronan drove Adam to school, and since he was there already, he ended up going to class too. That's how fucked he was: he was going to _class_.

He thought - wanted to believe - things were changing between him and Adam, but how could he really know? And even if he somehow knew for sure, what was he supposed to do about it? Things were going good. It’d be way too easy for him to fuck it all up. So for now, he’d keep waiting and watching.

*

Ronan had his headphones on, drifting but never actually asleep, when he felt something moving by the end of his bed. He opened his eyes quick and tore his headphones off, but it was just Shrike.

“What are you doing here, butcherbird?”

Shrike dropped something by Ronan’s feet and then turned around and hopped off the bed with the air of someone who had accomplished their mission.

It was a knife, in an aged leather sheath. Ronan picked it up and frowned down at it. It didn’t seem like one of his dream things. It just didn’t feel like something out of his head, it was sturdy and unadorned and looked like it’d been around a while, it felt like something you could get at the thrift store in town if you were planning on taking a hunting trip. If it wasn’t from the book, why’d Shrike bring it to him? And why was Shrike giving him things, not Adam?

Ronan pulled the knife from the sheath, and his heart did something funny in his chest. The blade was covered in intricate carvings, stylized trees and vines and flowers and wings and claws. The same things that made up his tattoo, they were such a close match, it was an obvious connection.

Ronan was on his feet and heading for the bookstore before he’d really processed any of it. He was knocking on Adam's apartment door still feeling like he didn't really know what was happening.

Adam answered the door with a wry sort of arch of his eyebrow. "Lynch," he greeted mildly.

Ronan moved past him into the apartment and held up the knife as soon as Adam closed the door. "What's this?"

"A knife," Adam answered.

Ronan ignored this. He pulled the blade from the sheath. "Did you do this?"

"Persephone helped me. She has carving tools. You know how she likes to dabble," Adam told him, like that was the part that mattered.

Ronan asked, "Why?"

Adam shrugged. His gaze was cautious but it didn't waver. "Why'd you give me that?" he asked, and he nodded at the book sitting on his desk.

The dream book.

"I was putting the palmistry books back the other day and I noticed it. It felt a little different than the other books, like the card that's meant for you when you're getting a reading. I opened it and the pages were hollowed out in the middle. In the hollow there was that pot." Adam nodded to the small ceramic pot studded with bits of colored glass that was sitting on the windowsill. "Once I took the pot out, the plant started to grow." From the pot grass was growing, a dry near colorless brown, and from the grass grew brilliant bright blue flowers with petals shaped like stars. "I figure it's safe to assume the book was where Shrike was getting all the dream things it was giving to me. After all that," Adam swallowed and Ronan's gaze dropped to his mouth on instinct. "I guess I wanted to try to return the favor."

And Ronan thought that if he was ever going to act, the time was now. He put the knife on the windowsill by the plant, and he reached out for Adam's wrist and pulled him in carefully, slowly. When Adam came forward willingly, Ronan kissed him.

Ronan kissed Adam more times than he'd ever wanted to count in his dreams, but God, this was _real_. Ronan had never felt this awake, alive with a thousand sensations. The feeling of Adam's lips on his, intent and hungry and lighting up all of Ronan's nerves with the awareness that Adam Parrish wanted this too. The heat of Adam's fingers gripping at the back of Ronan's neck, keeping Ronan in place and shifting their mouths that much closer. The quiet breathless noise Adam made against his mouth when Ronan swiped his thumb back and forth over Adam's hip bone.

Sometime later, when they both needed to catch their breath, Ronan smoothed his hands down Adam's waist and remembered to ask, "do you have work tomorrow?"

He wasn't taking anything for granted.

Adam's eyes were a little dazed when he looked at Ronan, and he had to blink as he thought about it, and it made pride sear through Ronan's chest like open flame. "Not till late. You can stay," Adam wet his lips. "If you want."

Ronan pulled Adam back into him. Real real real. They wouldn't ever need to dream again.


End file.
